Welsh crime writer and biographer of David Kelly.

Terrorism

During the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan the CIA helped fund and train Islamist guerillas. Despite the fact they were totalitarian religious fanatics and terrorists to boot, the US gave them money and material, including personal, portable, surface-to-air rockets known as Stingers, enabling them to take down Russian helicopters like the Mi-8.

During the Syrian Civil War, the CIA are helping to fund and train Islamist guerillas. Despite the fact they are totalitarian religious fanatics and terrorists to boot, the US are giving them money and material, including personal, portable, surface-to-air rockets known as MANPADS, enabling them to take down Russian helicopters like the Mi-8.

Islamists down Russian Mi-8 in Syria with US rockets, 2016

There is no reason at all to think this will work out any better than it did last time.

Sadly the policy is supported by not just the current US President, but by his likely Democrat successor Hillary Clinton, the UK government and – at the time of blogging – most of the Parliamentary Labour Party.

On Sunday the 16th of August the market in Douma, an outer suburb of Damascus, was bombed. The news was first reported by the Syrian Observatory of Human Rights, in a series of escalating bulletins until it finally arrived at the headline “more than 330 civilians killed and wounded in the genocide committed by the regime warplanes in Duma”.

Doumas market hours later. Credited to Firas Abdullah, who is reported by Al Jazeera and others to be a local photographer, but who is known to the Austrian police as a Tunisian Al Qaeda supporter.

The “international community”, as the West and its satellites are fond of calling themselves, was quick to voice its outrage, as it has been throughout its five year campaign for Syrian regime change.

The UN Undersecretary General for Humanitarian Affairs, Stephen O’Brien (ex-Cambridge, ex-Conservative MP), said he was “particularly appalled” at this “unlawful, unacceptable” targeting of non-combatants. The US State Department formally “condemns, in the strongest terms, the recent deadly airstrikes… on a market in the Damascus suburb of Douma that killed more than 100 people and injured hundreds, including innocent women and children.”

National Security Council Spokesperson Ned Price said: “This latest tragedy is just another reminder of the inhumane acts perpetrated daily by the Assad regime against the Syrian people. The regime is responsible for killing thousands of innocent Syrian civilians and destroying entire towns and cities, historical sites, schools, mosques, markets, and hospitals. These abhorrent actions underscore that the Assad regime has lost legitimacy and that the international community must do more to enable a genuine political transition.”

State Department Spokesman John Kirby said, the “airstrikes, following its other recent market bombings and attacks on medical facilities, demonstrate the regime’s disregard for human life. As we have said, Assad has no legitimacy to lead the Syrian people. The United States is working with our partners toward a genuine, negotiated political transition away from Assad that brings an end to such attacks and leads to a future that fulfils Syrians’ aspirations for freedom and dignity.”

The US Ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, inevitably chipped in. Rupert Colville, spokesman for the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (ex-Harrow, ex-Cambridge, son of Jock Colville, undisclosed relationship with the Foreign Office, wink wink), whose office has maintained since 2012 that they have “enough evidence of war crimes to refer Syria to the International Criminal Court”, was equally keen to voice his concern over “the outrageous bombing of a busy local marketplace.”

And so on, and so on.

Then the Douma Co-ordinating Committee, one of a network of committees set up on or before 2011, and funded by the US State Department and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, released a list of the dead (although it requires translation). It has 102 names on it. Ninety nine of them are men. Does that sound like a normal gender spread for an Arabic market? The Syrian government maintain they actually targeted a rebel HQ near the market. Given the fatalities, and Douma’s long-standing status as a rebel bastion, doesn’t that sound more plausible than the idea Assad’s air force are targeting Sunday markets?

For those keen to pore over pictures of this and other bombed markets, and ponder the damage and corpses therein, or lack therof, Eric Draitser has a compendium of links in this very relevant article. Draitser is of the opinion that the extant footage from Douma is far less gruesome than might be expected. What makes things murkier still is that soon afterwards all the bodies were buried in mass graves, so no identification or inquest is possible.What footage we do have reveals no sign at all of how the men were killed. They’re wrapped in blankets, and most do seem to be of fighting age. Draitser even speculates they might just as easily have been brought in from fighting elsewhere. Unsurprisingly it turns out that at least one of the Douma market victims miraculously survived.

Mohammad has just emerged from three days trapped in rubble.

In 2013 Douma was also the scene of another alleged war crime: a chemical weapons attack, one of several such attacks across Syria, attacks which were extensively recorded and reported. However, as with the market bombing, I’m not quite sure the evidence for these stacks up either (the UN feels the same way, so does Stratfor, and so does Gareth Porter, to name but a very few, while Mossad, the JIC and The Sun thought otherwise).

The story reminded me that despite the fact markets have no military value, they’re bombed all the time. Sometimes we presume it is simply an accident, like when the RAF bombed the market at Fallujah, killing between 50 people (the MoD’s figure, when they eventually admitted responsibility) and 200. But in almost every case, with the exception of four or five relatively minor incidents in Israel, whenever markets have been bombed over the last twenty years or so, the victims have been Muslim (I have started to compile a spreadsheet). These bombings occur with incredible frequency, and an astonishing number of them are never claimed by any terrorist group. Isn’t that bizarre? It suggests a strategy of tension, or perhaps several of them. Certainly it warrants further study.

Most of all, the reports from Douma reminded me of the market bombings in Sarajevo, or the Markale massacres, as they are sometimes known. The market in Sarajevo was bombed three times: once in 1992, once in 1994, and again in 1995. Or perhaps more accurately, it was hit by 120mm mortar shells. On each occasion there was ambiguity about whether the Serbs were actually responsible. General Michael Rose believed the shells actually came from the Bosnian side. Multiple sources (such as Michael Rose, David Owen, Boutros Boutros Ghali, President Mitterand, and Yasushi Akashi, the UN Special Envoy for Bosnia) refer to a secret UN investigation which found exactly that. A second, non-secret UN report (the one intended for publication) confined itself to saying the attack could not be confidently attributed to any particular faction.

I have visited the market in Sarajevo. An arc of attack was not apparent. Sightlines were few and very narrow. It would take exceptional skill, I think, to accurately and reliably hit it with the groupings and timings we are asked to believe in. I do not seek to exonerate the Bosnian Serbs, who seem to have sniped and shelled Sarajevo at will, but the mortar attacks in question reveal what you might call a tradition of unattributed, misreported, propagandistic attacks on Muslim markets. And the CIA and the Saudi-funded Islamists were present then just as they are today.

The bombing of Sarajevo market. What started here? (Patrick Chauvel, 5 February 1994).

For four years former FBI Agent Richard L Lambert was nominally in charge of the Amerithrax investigation. Lambert now claims he has been dissmissed from his current job (senior counterintelligence officer at the Energy Department) because of his continued insistence that the Bureau deliberately mishandled the case. He is now suing the FBI, and for those who haven’t been paying attention, his court filings comprise a series of explosive revelations.

Richard Lambert, in his FBI days.

Those with long memories will recall that one week after 9/11, somebody started using the US postal service to send anthrax to unsuspecting and seemingly random journalists and politicians. As well as anthrax, the envelopes contained letters which identified the acts as Islamist terrorism (“Allah is great”, “death to America”, “death to Israel”, etc). Thus a bridge was established between this Islamist terrorism and WMD. This link became the keystone of the entire war on terror, and ultimately provided the rationale for invading Iraq. As I make clear in my biography of David Kelly, Dark Actors, the claims that Iraq possessed WMD always tended to centre around biological WMD (and specifically anthrax), because bioweapons are the easiest WMD to make, and can be produced with the least infrastructure, thus making them the hardest WMD to detect. Amerithrax, as this news story was called, helped point 9/11 very quickly to Iraq. By October corporate media was blaming Baghdad.

The anthrax accompanying this came from US military labs.

9/11 brought conspiracy theory to the fore. Hundreds of millions of people believed it was an inside job, a false flag operation to enable the next chapter of American foreign policy. Their numbers have doubtlessly dwindled, but the Truth movement, as it tends to call itself, is still going strong. It has been met with something that has not yet been named, but might be described as the New Orthodoxy. Essentially this was an elite and anti-populist tendency to a) brand all those who doubt the corporate media as conspiracy theorists whilst b) classifying conspiracy theory as a dangerous, destablizing, anti-Semitic force. Notable proponents of this New Orthodoxy in the UK are David Aaronovitch (see Voodoo Histories) and Nick Cohen (“Conspiracy theories led to the calamitous movements of communism and nazism.”) In the US, the legal scholar Cass Sunstein, who happens to be the husband of Samantha Power, argued that conspiracy theory is a catalyst for anti-state violence, and that the government should infiltrate conspiracy theory groups (Sunstein classes the 9/11 ‘Truthers’ as domestic extremists). Closer to home, Cambridge University’s Leverholme-funded Conspiracy and Democracy project may provide an institutional example of the New Orthodoxy (“Are conspiracy theories destroying democracy?”), although I hope not.

I don’t think the Truth movement has proven that 9/11 was an inside job. But Amerithrax was. It is possible to be incredibly specific about strains of anthrax – because they are bacterial, they have DNA. Additionally, there are the processing treatments the anthrax in these letters recevied, which reduces the number of sources even further. This anthrax was a very finely ground, dry powder, with every granule given an anti-static polyglass coating, and electrocharged to aid aerial dispersal. It was a designer bioweapon. The Bureau found it could only have been produced by the US Army’s Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, or the private sector Batelle Memorial Institute at Ohio.

Faced with this incontrovertible evidence, the guy the FBI evenutally went after was a harmless, community-minded, Roman Catholic juggler and Celtic music afficianado with thirty six years’ service as a biodefence researcher at USAMRIID in Maryland. Military scientists can be a very prickly bunch (I’ve met dozens of them) but Bruce Ivins seems to have been well regarded by almost everyone he worked with. The FBI let him know he was their chief suspect and the Bureau followed him, overtly and covertly, with great scrutiny.

The pressure must have been immense. From released transcripts, which make for tragic reading, its clear that his questioners leant on him hard. His children were bribed to testify against him, even if they could only provide the most circumstantial evidence. They refused. Ivins, who suffered from depression, was also seeing a counsellor, who did not refuse these inducements. Her co-operation with the FBI was not only a fundamental breach of patient confidentiality, it amounted to asking leading and incriminating questions during their therapy sessions, something I suspect Ivins came to realise. Ivins was also, according to some of the agents involved, a closet crossdresser (much like J. Edgar Hoover). Distressed and disturbed, he killed himself with a Tylenol overdose as a consqeuence of FBI harassment on the 29th of July, 2008. More than 200 of his co-workers attended his memorial.

I often thought of Ivins when I was writing the biography of David Kelly. The Oxfordshire scientist may have been mistreated by the state, but it was nothing compared to what the FBI did to Ivins.

Bruce Ivins RIP.

“They took an innocent man, a distinguished scientist, and smeared his reputation, dishonored him, questioned his children and drove him to take his life,” one anonymous colleague told ABC News. “He just didn’t have the swagger, the ego to pull off that kind of thing, and he didn’t have the lab skills to make the fine powder anthrax that was used in the letters.”

(One might also wonder about the wisdom of letting a dangerous bioterrorist know full well they’re your chief suspect, but then that’s exactly what Agent Lambert did with the previous suspect, Steven Hatfill. Either Lambert’s team never wanted to build a viable case, and/or they believed themselves, from the outset, to be working against a highly organized conspiracy that involved elements of the intelligence community.)

As soon as Ivins committed suicide the FBI and the Department of Justice promptly announced that he was the Amerithrax terrorist and closed the case. Scrabbling for a likely motive, the Feds said Ivins held a patent on an anthrax vaccine he had developed, and hoped to make money from the resulting scare. This was nonsense: Ivins had helped develop it, but the money went to the US Military. In fact the entire case against Ivins was ridiculous and dishonest. The catalogue of lies, distortions, and errors is extensive, and far too long to go into here, but many decent people have made comprehensive rebuttals here, here and here.

Lambert says he is still sitting on a wealth of classified information, but the gist of his filings thus far make clear that he was ordered to make Ivins the chief suspect, and that head office repeatedly denied him staff and support to pursue any other avenues. He says the FBI hid vast amounts of evidence that showed Ivins was innocent, while leaking tangential pointers that Ivins could be guilty as definitive fact.

So, these are explosive revelations, but they will suprise few who have followed the case. After all, the argument for flase flag operations is not hard for certain quarters to morally support. For example: you want to start a war, you have accepted there will be a “blood price”, and you understand there is a risk of failure. Based on those terms, why should you shrink from paying that blood price before the war formally begins? Otherwise you might not get to have your war at all. When we understand what false flags are, when our media can acknowledge their existence, these operations will become far less effective. Perhaps one day we will mature.

In the meantime it is surely self-evident that the rise of conspiracy theory is not destroying democracy, but a symptom of its decline. The lessons of Bruce Ivins and Amerithrax are obvious, but I am not aware of a single MSM personality prepared to acknowledge them.

After a few news cycles it seems the media have finally caught up with the report’s most significant aspect: the harassment and torture of Adebolajo by MI5 and SIS respectively. I was amazed the Committee bothered to ask any questions about this at all, but they did. I’d be surprised if it was Rifkind’s idea. Understanding the significance of these questions necessitates context.

What transformed and magnified the murder of Lee Rigby into an act of terrorism, and a major politico-cultural event, was the British establishment and the milking of public sentiment. In fact it was this sensationalism which made the ISC report compulsory – the idea a man should be stabbed on a British street does not normally call for a pretend overhaul of the county’s intelligence apparatus. A British soldier was stabbed to death in Cyprus six months previously, and again the following summer in Barbados, without triggering government inquiries. The neighbourhood where Rigby was murdered sees stabbings on a weekly basis without arousing the slightest concern in Parliament or the media. Similarly, none of the murders committed by soldiers themselves (and there have been several in between the death of Drummer Rigby and today) have raised governmental eyebrows or editorial alarm. Ironically, it is the earnestness of the Woolwich report which reveals the mechanics of this absurd amplification.

To any neutral observer, Rigby’s murder was homicide as a precursor to suicide-by-cop. Any terroristic ambitions on the part of his killers had been reduced to nil by the 22nd of May 2013. The sudden, futile murder of Lee Rigby was the final act of two hopeless men. Given that the harassment and infiltration of Britain’s Muslim communities is intense, I had privately assumed, on hearing the news, that the pair had killed their handler. But the British military was simply following its standard procedure of informing the serviceman’s family before the press. Nevertheless my assumption was not a wholly misplaced. The report confirms what has already become widely known: Adebolajo spent his final years of freedom surrounded by aspiring handlers, against whom he ultimately rebelled.

The circumstantial and indirect evidence for this is abundant. The answers of the intelligence and security services on this point, and SIS in particular, when pressed by the Committee itself, are described in the report as “dismissive”, “pre-judging”, “completely inappropriate”, “uncertain”, “unclear”, “difficult”, “deeply unsatisfactory”. Suffice to say the Committee “does not agree with SIS’s assessment” and is “deeply concerned”. The root of all this is Adebolajo’s arrest and torture in Kenya.

Adebolajo flew to Kenya in late 2010, reportedly under a false passport which gave his name as Michael Olemindis Ndemolajo. Obtaining a false UK passport is tricky, but procuring one of specific age and ethnicity (a Nigerian Yoruba) under a very similar name is impressive – unless you’re an intelligence agency. The Kenyans arrested “Ndemolajo” in late November, at a guesthouse on the Kenyan island of Lamu, on the understanding he was trying to cross into neighbouring Somalia, and some days after this arrest Adebolajo appeared in court, and thus in Kenyan media, under that assumed identity. The Foreign Office apparently provided consular assistance to him under that name also.

SIS told the ISC they had no idea Adebolajo was in Kenya until two days after his arrest. In truth Adebolajo had been picked up by a Kenyan counter-terrorist unit that was part-staffed by SAS soldiers and part-run by SIS. Furthermore, one of the people instrumental in facilitating Adebolajo’s pseudonymous trip was a Kenyan-based British “Subject of Interest” already known to MI5. Five asked Six if he was their guy. Answer came there none, at least as far as the ISC knows.

So let’s recap: Adebolajo gets, from somewhere, a superb fake passport. He flies to Kenya. He has arranged to meet a guy out there who is probably already an MI6 agent. He is arrested and detained almost immediately, with the participation of British Special Forces. No legal grounds are given for his arrest. Despite this, he appears in court anyway, and his photo thus appears in the press.

Adebolajo as ‘Ndemolajo’ in a Mombasa courtroom. British officials told Kenyan police he was a “clean man.”

Interestingly, the photo was taken by one Michael Richards, an unknown photographer who has only ever distributed two photos through AFP – this, and one depicting the January 2012 appearance in a Mombasa courtroom of Lamu cleric Aboud Rogo Mohammed, charged on six counts related to the illegal possession of firearms. He was bailed, and reappeared on the same charges in August, when the Kenya police explained they hadn’t actually taken any photos, or even an inventory, of the weapons in question. That’s because Rogo had been fitted up by the same SIS-led anti-terror unit that entrapped Adebolajo. When the trial duly collapsed, that same unit killed Rogo in an extrajudicial execution, shooting him more than seventeen times while he was driving his car, narrowly missing his five year-old daughter, but catching his wife in the leg. Still, that’s pretty good aim for a drive-by. That was in late August, 2012, and it triggered riots. It is impossible to understand the Woolwich killing without taking into account MI6’s dirty war in Kenya.

“The only reason we have killed this man today is because Muslims are dying daily by British soldiers,” Adebolajo told a passerby that May morning on Wellington Street. “So what if we want to live by the Sharia in Muslim lands? Why does that mean you must follow us and chase us and call us extremists and kill us?”

Adebolajo had been detained by those British soldiers. He had been tortured, or at least threatened with torture, by either those soldiers or their Kenyan accomplices, and he had a better idea of what the Secret Intelligence Service were doing in Kenya than any mainstream media outlet. By October this SAS-SIS Kenyan anti-terror outfit (ARCTIC in the ISC report) had performed five assassinations – that we know of- in as many months. The total as of today is 21.

On his return to the UK, Adebolajo is freely readmitted (Kenya maintains he was deported, the ISC were told he flew back under his own ticket). No interest is shows in his passport, his treatment while detained, the legal grounds for his arrest, or the identity of the individual/s he met during his stay. The Kenyan sojourn is as clear a set-up as you’ll ever see. Either SIS were trying to turn Adebolajo, or they were trying to turn his younger brother, a teacher in Saudi who they were in contact with around this time.

Back in the UK, separate from SIS’s efforts, MI5 step-up their attempts to claim him for their own. As far as we know, they confine these attempts to police harassment, or “disruption”. “Disruption,” the report explains, “is the term MI5 uses describe ‘actions taken to manage risks posed by Subjects of Interest or networks,’ for instance arresting and imprisoning an individual.” So at MI5’s insistence they pick Adebolajo up again and again, for alleged drugs offences (the ISC report refers to him openly as a drug dealer), for involvement in the London riots, anything they can possibly think of. He is never charged.

“Disruption based on criminal activities offers a potential opportunity to reduce the threat posed by extremists,” the report notes, approvingly, while failing to reflect that every known criminal allegation against Adebolajo was a fabrication by MI5. Bear in mind that during this time there is also a photo of Adebloajo, as Ndemolajo, in that Mombasa courtoom, registered with the photo library at AFP. Only SIS know that it’s him. This is probably just one of the things that Vauxhall Bridge had over the Adebolajo brothers. Anything recorded or videod during Michael’s Kenyan detention would also constitute effective leverage.

That’s the full backdrop to Michael Adebolajo’s last act while a free, albeit compromised, man. His younger and more impressionable co-criminal remains a cipher. Adebolajo’s decision to a murder a British soldier was his own, but it was shaped and formed by two things. The spirit of Islamist jihad was one. The second was his treatment by British intelligence. Each must share equal blame. It isn’t appropriate, or right, for SIS to treat UK citizens like they were Soviet officers. I wonder if those who aspired to control him have the self-awareness to feel guilty. Knowing the institutional mindset, I doubt it.

In between my last two posts the media have come somewhat closer to all this. Cameron has announced the new Intelligence Services Commissioner will look into possible SIS miscounduct. This will occur under greater secrecy, and with even more bias, than the ISC routinely operates, so I would expect it to be completely pointless. Very few people care anyway.